threats of terrible reprisals if anyone in the village gave me the slightest warning or clue.  When the whole miserable business was accomplished, I was just like a trapped animal inside a cage, held captive by immovable bars of obstinate silence and cruel indifference.  No one would help me.  No one ostensibly knew anything; no one had seen anything, heard anything.  The child was gone!  My servants, the people in the village—­some of whom I could have sworn were true and sympathetic—­only shrugged their shoulders.  ’Que voulez-vous, Madame?  Children of bourgeois as well as of aristos were often taken up by the State to be brought up as true patriots and no longer pampered like so many lap-dogs.’

“Three days later I received a letter from that inhuman monster, Jean Paul Marat.  He told me that he had taken my child away from me, not from any idea of revenge for my disdain in the past, but from a spirit of pure patriotism.  My boy, he said, should not be brought up with the same ideas of bourgeois effeteness and love of luxury which had disgraced the nation for centuries.  No! he should be reared amongst men who had realised the true value of fraternity and equality and the ideal of complete liberty for the individual to lead his own life, unfettered by senseless prejudices of education and refinement.  Which means, Monsieur,” the poor woman went on with passionate misery, “that my child is to be reared up in the company of all that is most vile and most degraded in the disease-haunted slums of indigent Paris; that, with the connivance of that execrable fiend Marat, my only son will, mayhap, come back to me one day a potential thief, a criminal probably, a drink-sodden reprobate at best.  Such things are done every day in this glorious Revolution of ours—­done in the sacred name of France and of Liberty.  And the moral murder of my child is to be my punishment for daring to turn a deaf ear to the indign passion of a brute!”

Once more she paused, and when the melancholy echo of her broken voice had died away in the narrow room, not another murmur broke the stillness of this far-away corner of the great city.

The man did not move.  He stood looking down upon the poor woman before him, a world of pity expressed in his deep-set eyes.  Through the absolute silence around there came the sound as of a gentle flutter, the current of cold air, mayhap, sighing through the ill-fitting shutters, or the soft, weird soughing made by unseen things.  The man’s heart was full of pity, and it seemed as if the Angel of Compassion had come at his bidding and enfolded the sorrowing woman with his wings.

A moment or two later she was able to finish her pathetic narrative.